The Property of a Gentleman: One House. Many secrets.

by Catherine Gaskin

  The Property of a Gentleman

  Catherine Gaskin

  Copyright © The Estate of Catherine Gaskin 2013

  This edition first published 2013 by Corazon Books

  Wyndham Media Ltd

  27 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AX

  www.greatstorieswithheart.com

  The moral right of the author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Catherine Gaskin was born in Ireland and raised in Australia. She studied music at the conservatorium in Sydney, before becoming a bestselling author at the age of just seventeen. After moving to London she met her future husband, a US TV executive, on a blind date. The couple lived in Manhattan for ten years, and then moved to the Virgin Islands, followed by Ireland, and the Isle of Man. After her husband’s death, Catherine returned to Australia where she spent the rest of her life.

  During her lifetime Catherine Gaskin’s books sold over 40 million copies worldwide, and she was known as “The Queen of Storytellers” and “The Girl with the Golden Pen.”

  Read more at:

  www.catherinegaskin.com

  www.thepropertyofagentleman.com

  Table of Contents

  IN LOVING MEMORY

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  IN LOVING MEMORY OF

  LEE BARKER

  EDITOR AND FRIEND

  Author’s Note

  I wish to acknowledge my immense gratitude to Christie’s for their kindness and generosity in allowing me a behind-the-scenes view of the way they work. However, the Hardy’s of my story is not Christie’s; nor are the characters based on any living people. If the demands of fiction have required of my characters certain actions which are at variance with the principles or practice of a great auction house, the responsibility is entirely mine.

  C. G.

  Prologue

  About half of the ninety-three passengers, those in the tail section, of the flight out of Zürich bound for Paris and London survived when the plane ploughed into a mountainside shortly after takeoff. Among those killed was a Junior British Cabinet Minister, half of a Dutch football team, an antique dealer from London by the name of Vanessa Roswell, and a man, presumed to be a Dutchman, whose body no one came to claim, and whose passport the authorities, after close examination, found to be forged.

  Within hours of the crash the daughter of Vanessa Roswell and a friend, Gerald Stanton, were on their way to Zürich, with the desperate unspoken hope that Vanessa might be among the survivors; they had only just learned that Vanessa had been on that flight. Before he left London, Gerald Stanton put through a telephone call to an associate in Mexico City, who in turn managed the difficult feat of reaching by telephone a remote hacienda in the mountains south of Taxco; then a man who hated cities, and hated flying, went to Mexico City and took the first plane to Europe – any city in Europe which had a connection to Zürich, he wearily told the booking clerk. It was the day after the crash when he arrived, and it was snowing, the snow blanketing the terrible debris. The man shivered and longed for the Mexican sun. The bodies of the victims were in the school of the small village near to where the plane had come down. The body of Vanessa Roswell had already been identified, so he went to a hotel five miles away to which the police directed him. There he found, sitting in silence before a fire in a private sitting-room, Gerald Stanton and a young woman, a beautiful young woman, he thought, gauging her with his painter’s eye, whose face now wore the numbed expression of shock and grief. She looked at him without recognition. That was not surprising; he hadn’t seen her for twenty-seven years.

  ‘Joanna,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m Jonathan – your father, Jonathan Roswell.’

  CHAPTER 1

  I

  But it was not of my father, Jonathan Roswell, we talked that day at lunch more than two weeks later.

  ‘A year in gaol would change any man, I suppose, but when it is a sentence for the manslaughter of your wife and son, it must have been a particular sort of hell for him.’

  Gerald drew slowly on his cigarette, not at all hurried by the thought that we still had a long way to travel that afternoon; I refrained from looking at my watch. He would have seen the gesture, and disliked it. He had deliberately sought out this well-recommended restaurant far off the motorway, had had his Martini to the exact degree of dryness and chill his cultivated palate demanded, had had his wine with lunch. Because I was driving I restricted myself to one Tío Pepe. It had been the kind of disappointing, heartbreaking morning one too often experienced in the auction business, and the tension of it still stayed with me. I had hardly begun to focus on what lay ahead of us.

  ‘His father and grandfather were well established in the pattern of English eccentrics – and Robert added his own bizarre touch. They were recluses and autocrats within their own world – it must have seemed like their own kingdom in those days, being so isolated and remote. Robert quarrelled with his father – Birkett fathers and sons seemed to make a habit of that. And then Robert committed the heresy of joining the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War – and yet while he was there he married a girl from an aristocratic Spanish family, who, of course, fought with Franco. A Catholic, naturally. Robert returned to Thirlbeck only for his father’s funeral. It seemed all of a piece with the strangeness of his life, somehow, that he was actually on his way back there when the accident happened. So he attended his father’s funeral, and then the funeral of his wife and son. Afterwards they charged him with manslaughter – said he’d been drinking and lost control of the car. A year’s sentence, and remission for good behaviour.’

  ‘And I suppose he’s kept to the pattern himself – a recluse in his own little world ever since.’ I said it absently, thinking of the journey ahead, half my mind back with the momentous journey into another country and another age, almost, that I had just completed.

  Gerald had stubbed out his cigarette and he added to my impatience now by pausing to light another. I realised I was fussing again, worrying about small things – after all, this was a restaurant, not the auction house of Hardy’s in St James’s, the place that was the centre of both our lives. In Hardy’s one was not permitted to smoke in the public rooms, or the great salerooms, and this restriction of time and place had been hammered into my head since I was eighteen, the most junior on the Front Counter. Gerald, who had to observe the rule also, smoked incessantly at other times; he was in his late sixties, and a lifelong devotion to good wine and food had produced only a pleasing roundness of face, and the slightest thickening at the waist. He didn’t even have a smoker’s cough. I suppose if I had to name my closest friend I would have named him. Friend, that is. I was twenty-seven. It was nice to have a friend who had never even remotely threatened to become a lover.

  ‘Quite the contrary,’ Gerald answered. ‘He got out of gaol just after the war started in 1939, and immediately enlisted in the ranks. I suppose he was anti-Establishment before anyone heard the w
ord. Nothing would persuade him to take a commission. Perhaps he intended he would just serve out the war as anonymously as possible. But he wasn’t born to be anonymous. He won an M.M. at Dunkirk, and a V.C. in the Western Desert. He received his V.C. from the King, and that must have been one of the few times an ex-convict has ever been invited to Buckingham Palace. People who knew him said he wasn’t really the stuff of heroes – just lacked imagination, and he was so numb after prison that he really didn’t feel anything. Certainly not danger. Myself, I think that’s a slander. I remember Robert at Eton – a terribly shy boy, only moderately good in class, but superbly endowed as an athlete. Of course, being good at games pushed him into prominence, whether he wanted it or not. I’ve seen him literally shaking in the dressing-room after making more than a century at cricket, and he would come off the winter playing fields blue with cold, as if he’d never run half a yard, and yet in his last year he was Captain of the Field. I think he didn’t last more than a year at Cambridge, but in that time he got his Blue in several sports. People without imagination just aren’t like that – their guts are in whatever they’re doing. If Robert ended the war as probably the most decorated private in the British Army, it wasn’t because he didn’t know what he was about. And he stayed a private, right to the end. It was almost an embarrassment. When it was all over he made a determined effort to disappear. But people like Robert find it difficult to disappear.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Gerald frowned a little. ‘I know he tried to go back to Thirlbeck, and I think he might have stuck it out there for perhaps six months. Then he left it, and so far as I know he’s never been back. He began to travel – some of the usual places, the Caribbean, Italy, Greece. He was always among the first to find the newest watering place, and then moving on when the herd arrived. He was part of the Jet Set before anyone knew it existed. He helped to make it. But when I’ve encountered him in one of the more usual places – I mean the comfortable ones, he always seemed just to be back from some odd spot like Yucatán, or the Falkland Islands – or sailing round Cape Horn the wrong way. He’s managed to talk himself on to a couple of archaeological digs – doing the donkey work and getting none of the glory.’ Gerald barely repressed a shudder at the thought of such discomfort. ‘I don’t think he ever had a permanent home – always rented villas. He never married again. That might have been too permanent for him also. But he probably has had a dozen-odd mistresses in that time – some rich, some famous, some both. All of them beautiful, those that I’ve seen. He could always attract women, could Robert, and do it without seeming to make any obvious overtures. Robert has style – which is something different again from charm. He always has had it, even in the days when he was that painfully shy schoolboy. He could melt the hearts of every girl and woman watching just by the way he walked out to bat. You’ll see, he’ll be wearing his historic millstone with grace.’

  Outside, the bright April morning had darkened to a grey, rain-threatened afternoon. ‘Odd, I don’t remember ever hearing of him. And I’m not quite so stodgy that I don’t look at the gossip columns.’

  Gerald shrugged. ‘Well, put it down to the fact that he’s probably – well, he’s in his early sixties now. He hasn’t lived in England since the Forties. He’s not one of the young Beautiful People. And add to that the fact that in the last few years it’s been common knowledge that he’s been short of money. Let’s just be blunt and say he’s probably broke. He doesn’t buy jewellery for beautiful ladies any longer, nor give any parties. He may yet become the recluse you imagined. By necessity, not by choice.’

  ‘Unless he decides on a sale, and then goes off and lives off the proceeds.’

  Gerald’s lips tightened just a trifle. He lifted his fingers to summon the waiter for the bill. ‘My dear Joanna …’ From the way he said it, I knew I had displeased him. ‘I really am surprised that by now you do not display more discretion. There is not yet even the whisper of a sale. All we know is that he is financially embarrassed, and that he has returned, hardly a week ago, to a house he has not been known to visit since 1945.’ He gestured with a touch of irritation. ‘After close to thirty years of an absentee owner, who knows what sort of state the place is in. For all we know, there may be nothing to make a sale of. These old houses ... who knows ...’

  ‘Then why are you going?’

  About to rise, Gerald settled back into the chair again. ‘I have been invited, that’s why. An invitation always means something. I was leaving Eton the year he entered. I once remember doing a small favour for him – the very lightest gesture that a Sixth Former might make to protect the very rawest entrant into that rather barbarous system of education. Whether or not he remembers it, I don’t know. Neither of us, of course, has ever mentioned it since.’ Now his irritation was gone. ‘In this business, Jo, as you know, we go anywhere we’re invited socially – and keep our eyes open because there’s always the off-chance that in twenty years’ time someone may want to sell their Constable, or their set of Sèvres, and they’ll think of Hardy’s before they think of Christie’s or Sotheby’s. But this invitation wasn’t quite like most others. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I sensed a kind of desperate need of a lonely man returning to a place he dislikes, a man with few friends left in England, and perhaps a fear of what he goes back to. When he asked to meet me at the club about ten days ago I had the impression of a man twisting in some kind of uncertainty. He needs advice ... perhaps he needs help. I believe that is why he asked me to come.’ Now he did rise to his feet, looking down at me. ‘And that is why I asked you to come with me.’ He gave me his smile of restrained affection. ‘We all of us have need of our friends, Jo.’

  I stayed until he had paid the bill, just slightly over tipping as was his habit; then he wandered off to the Gents in a leisurely fashion. I was both warmed by his love, and rebuked for my lack of sensitivity. I went out to the car park, and spent the waiting time emptying the ashtray, wiping the windscreen, dusting the instrument panel, studying the map yet again – all this, and cursing myself for being a fool. Was I going to spend my life emptying ashtrays, because that was what they had taught me? But they’d taught me a lot more than that at Hardy’s – along with it a kind of reverence for people like Gerald who seemed to know far more than I could ever hope to. So I was willing to empty ashtrays, carry his suitcases, chauffeur his stately Daimler, because Gerald didn’t like to drive, just for the experience of being with him, of going over a house, as we had done that morning, of seeing his discerning eye run over a library, a few pictures, a ceramic collection, while I made notes. I was privileged, and I knew it; and I also couldn’t bear what was so often too evident – I couldn’t bear the hope, pitifully revealed in the anxious hovering of the owner, who pretended indifference. But I could see the shabbiness of once-elegant rooms, feel the chill of unheated houses, the encroaching neglect of gardens. But even I, whose subject wasn’t pictures, could tell that the painting was only of the school of Reynolds or Romney, and that under the grime of another large canvas was only a bad copy of a Rubens. When paintings like these came up for auction at Hardy’s they would, just possibly, be labelled under those names, but that only meant that Hardy’s considered them to have been painted at about the period of Reynolds or Rubens. If Hardy’s decided upon putting the initials of the painter in the catalogue, it would have meant that one of his pupils or a close associate of the master might have done the work. To have labelled a canvas Sir Peter Paul Rubens would have put the full weight of the authority of a great auction house behind it and it would have been a major art sale. We had known there would be no major art to discover when Gerald and I had gone to Draycote Manor that morning. ‘After all,’ Gerald had said as we had driven up the weed-grown drive, ‘we already know where everything is – south of the Wash, that is. There’s very little to discover, and I don’t expect anything here. But if people pay for us to come to do a valuation ...’ He shrugged, as if to dismiss it, but privately I had always considered H
ardy’s fees for travelling to do a valuation very modest.

  I had rather liked the owner of Draycote Manor, a gentle, sad man whose wife had died a few years ago, and who wandered his house now like a lost soul, wondering how to find the money to keep it in repair. I would have liked if there had been something we believed would justify his hopes. What he had to offer would fetch some money – but cause no excitement. There wouldn’t be enough out of his sale to halt the decay around him. My eyes had fallen instantly on the baluster vases and covers in the hall that his letter had mentioned. Famille Noire, he thought they were. They weren’t. They were rather poor copies, made in England, during the last century. His grandfather had told him they came from China, he said. I felt wretched over his disappointment. I had been hoping they would be Famille Noire too. My subject was ceramics. But of course I had left it to Gerald, who was senior, and a former director of Hardy’s, to tell him. I was furious with myself for feeling his disappointment – and yet if I hadn’t been disappointed that there was no Famille Noire, I couldn’t have served those years at Hardy’s, wouldn’t have been emptying Gerald’s ashtrays for the privilege of learning from him, wouldn’t have passed through the ranks of the novices, edging my way towards being fairly knowledgeable, towards developing an eye, and keeping the distant hope that one day I would be an expert, the expert, the one whose name could authenticate a piece. That was still a long way off.

  As I waited I swung the driving mirror down and combed my hair. The face I saw always seemed to belong to a stranger – was it because I tried to please too many people too often, and had never given myself a chance to let my own personality come through on it? It was a good-looking face; that much I knew from other people. On the Front Counter at Hardy’s it had been part of the show, and plenty of men had smiled at me, young and old. Gerald liked me to drive him not only because I drove well, but because of the way I looked, just as he liked his Martinis, dry and cold. When I had ended my probation period on the Front Counter some wit at Hardy’s had made a remark about Jo Roswell disappearing into the dust of the ceramics department, never to be seen again. Twenty-seven. Not old, but not so young any more either. I worked more determinedly at my hair, and paid some attention to my lips. Was all my passion, and were all my young years to go on Famille Noire? Then I saw Gerald strolling across the car park and, like a dutiful Girl Guide, I sprang out of the car and rushed to open the door for him. I did it before I could stop myself. Damn it! Hadn’t I got any blood in my veins besides what Hardy’s had put there?